Tag: linux

We’ve recently released v0.5.0 of RancherOS, the latest major release since v0.4.0. Since then, we’ve moved RancherOS out of an alpha state and made many changes to improve both stability and user experience. In addition to various bug fixes and support for Docker 1.11, v0.5.0 includes the following changes:

Official Raspberry Pi Image

On our releases page you can now find an official Raspberry Pi image which is known to work on both Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. We’re especially excited about this since it offers users a cheap method of getting started with Docker and RancherOS. We’d like to thank the Hypriot team for their assistance on this feature.

Improved Build Process

Our build process has been refactored to support multiple architectures. With a given kernel, RancherOS can now be built for both ARM and ARM64 devices. In addition, the build process is now faster than it was previously which makes it easier than ever to create custom builds of RancherOS.

Console Switching without a Reboot

Switching to an alternate console can now be done without a reboot. The `ros console` subcommand was added to make this an easy process. The available consoles can be listed with `ros console list`. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS consoles are currently available. The `ros console switch` command can be used to perform the switch.

Additional Configuration Options

Several additional cloud-config options were added.

`console` – Sets the console container without having to add system services

`resize_device` – Enables partition expanding with relying on a system service or network access

`mounts` – Implements the cloud-init `mounts` key, which allows a set of mounts to be specified

Demo

While the best way to check out these new features is to launch RancherOS, we’ve recorded a new demo that covers the basics of the operating system:

Conclusion

This is an exciting release for us to bring to our community and users. It’s great to watch RancherOS as it becomes a more stable operating system for a variety of uses. As always, we are keeping to the philosophy that RancherOS should only include the minimum necessary to get Docker up and running. To get started with RancherOS or learn more about it, check out our docs. If you have questions or issues, please head over to our Github page or to the RancherOS forums.

Today we are excited to announce a major release of RancherOS. The first release of RancherOS was announced just six months ago. At that time, powering an entire operating system with Docker was a really experimental concept. We had good reason to believe it was a good idea, but honestly we didn’t know how well it would play out and what issues we might encounter. I’m excited to say that it’s worked out great. Having said that, we felt that sometimes RancherOS could be a little difficult to grasp for new users. With RancherOS v0.4 we made a number of major enhancements to improve usability and customization. To do this we made improved support for various storage systems, made it easier to run go binaries, simplified configuration, improved the console experience, introduced a better build system, and reduced the size of the runtime footprint. Read more

Hi, I’m Sidhartha Mani, one of the engineers at Rancher, and I wanted to provide a quick overview for how to get started using RancherOS. RancherOS is a micro-linux distribution that has the aim of providing just the right amount of OS to run Docker. It turns out, all Docker really requires to function is the kernel. RancherOS embraces this by running Docker as PID1 and everything running inside of it is a container. At about 22MB, the OS is easy to distribute, orchestrate and spin up in your data center. You can learn more about RancherOS on our website.

In this blog, I will walk through spinning up RancherOS on virtualbox using Docker machine. This is the easiest way to get RancherOS up and running.

Nagios is a fantastic monitoring tool, and I wanted to see if I could get the agent to run as a system container on RancherOS, in order to monitor the host and any Docker containers running on it. It turned out to be incredibly easy. In this blog post, I’ll walk through how to launch the Nagios agent as system container in RancherOS. Specifically, I’ll use two vagrant boxes to cover:

As you may have seen, Rancher recently announced our integration with docker-machine. This integration will allow users to spin up Rancher compute nodes across multiple cloud providers right from the Rancher UI. In our initial release, we supported Digital Ocean. Amazon EC2 is soon to follow and we’ll continue to add more cloud providers as interest dictates. We believe this feature will really help the Zero-to-Docker _(and Zero-to-Rancher)_ experience.

But the feature itself is not the focus of this post. In this post, I want to detail the software architerture employed to achieve this integration. Read more

This week we released RancherOS 0.2, which introduces support for upgrades. RancherOS is a tiny Linux distribution designed specifically to run Docker, using containers to isolate user and system processes. Given that RancherOS does just about everything with containers, it shouldn’t be a surprise that upgrading a RancherOS node is almost exactly like upgrading a Docker container.

All of the upgrade procedures in RancherOS are accessed through the “rancherctl” system service. Use the following command to determine the current version of RancherOS that you’re using: Read more